Are You Tough Enough for This Tender Chicken?

Don't be misled by the cute little chicken there. Toki Tori 2+ is not for the uninitiated. Image: Two Tribes

Toki Tori 2+, a new version of a Wii U game now available on PC and Mac, might feature a protagonist as cute as his distant cousins the Angry Birds, but don’t let that fool you.

Dutch game developer Two Tribes released its debut game Toki Tori in 2001, and in the 12 years since, it’s been re-releasing and updating it on every platform imaginable. Despite its cartoony looks, it’s an incredibly complex, challenging game.

In the sequel, the fat little bird that players control can only do two things: Make chirping noises, and pound the ground with his plump yellow butt. An entire ecosystem of animals responds in unique ways to these two basic actions, and you must discover how to manipulate them into helping you along your path.

Discovery is Toki Tori 2+‘s strength, and its weakness. It’s a weakness that plagues videogames more than other creative mediums: Game developers can have a hard time communicating to their players what exactly they’re getting themselves into with any given title.

Movie viewers can usually figure out what genre a film falls into just by watching the trailer. If that doesn’t do the trick, the first few minutes of the film itself will tip everyone off.

Same goes for books: We can tell just from looking at a text layout whether we’re reading a textbook, a poem or a piece of fiction.

Books and movies don’t have to waste a lot of time explaining themselves because nearly everyone is book-literate and movie-literate: We have a grasp already of the range of experiences available to us and the tools to tell one from the other.

The same is not true for games.

Just a small subset of us know from the moment we pick up a controller whether we’re about to play a thoughtful puzzle game like Fez, a fast-paced rollercoaster thriller like Call of Duty or an open-world action-adventure like Tomb Raider. Even if the game is an inventive genre-bending title like Viva Piñata, game-literate players will recognize enough of the disparate elements to quickly grasp “the point.”

But most people you know don’t have that skill. You know that family member who inevitably runs face-first into walls, trying to navigate even the most basic environments in your favorite first-person-shooter? That’s videogame illiteracy in action.

The wild success of Angry Birds altered perceptions about who was and wasn’t a “gamer.” After it became The Best Selling Thing Ever, many mobile game developers smartly realized that an entire generation of smartphone owners had suddenly become a little more game-literate. These new players had learned how to deal competently with touch controls. They knew how to navigate an in-game menu, and understood the concept of replaying levels to improve one’s score.

Cut the Rope came out and stole many elements from Angry Birds — grid-based menus, a three-star scoring system, a buttonless control scheme — precisely because its makers knew that many previously game-illiterate players suddenly possessed an understanding of those elements of game design. The non-gamers who’d spent hours flinging birds were able to comfortably move on to cutting ropes, a similar symbolic interaction to the few they already understood.

Other developers realized the same thing the Cut the Rope makers did, and to this day nearly every puzzle game for touchscreen phones use those same elements. In order to signal to people that “this is the sort of game you already know how to play,” these games are designed with cute, me-too animal mascots and colorful, cartoony graphics.

It was in an attempt to counteract this hurdle — you only know how to play videogames if you’ve already played them before — that game developers began, years back, adding tutorial sections into their games so that new players didn’t feel overwhelmed. But in recent years, certain developers have started to think that these segments insult the intelligence of hardcore gamers, and have started paring them back. Role-playing games like Dark Souls thrive on confusing and mercilessly killing the player, and part of the joy of playing it is figuring out how it works. And that’s for lifelong gamers. If you’re not a diehard already, you don’t have the analytical tools to figure them out at all.

I’ve played this game, and I don’t even know what’s going on in this Toki Tori 2+ screenshot.

Toki Tori 2 adheres to this new design philosophy almost religiously. There is not a single piece of text in the game, no giant floating letters urging players to hit this or that button to jump. To learn how the various creatures and tools in the world interact with one another, you’ll simply have to play around with them and observe.

That might be fine for the Dark Souls crowd, but the Angry Birds players that see Toki Tori 2+ with its cutesy Japanese title, huggable animal protagonist and Pixar aesthetic will be fooled into thinking this will be another lighthearted walk in the park.

If I were to try to get anyone to play Toki Tori 2, I know that first I’d have to explain that it’s a puzzle game where the object is to carefully observe the environment to learn how the different animals interact. By pushing the animals together and experimenting, I’d explain, you can learn how to navigate through the world. Yes, it is slow and sometimes hard, but it’s supposed to be.

I would have to be the one to communicate that because Toki Tori 2 communicates nothing about itself at all. And the developer thus runs the significant risk of having players pick it up and then quickly decide that it’s the hardest, worst Super Mario-style game they’ve ever played.

Two Tribes needn’t have designed an easier game, or even a less adorable one; they just needed to communicate within the game itself what exactly Toki Tori 2 is and is not. This game is far too good to accidentally exclude everyone except those who’ve been playing games all their lives.